Concrete or symbolic language. . .

The great challenge in Christianity is to speak in the same concrete terminology that Scripture does and to stay away from symbolic language.  Indeed, the genius of the creeds are that they speak with one voice the one language of Scripture to say who God is and who He is not.  Too often we forego the language of creed and confession and end up with sentimental images or symbolic descriptions of who God is like but without the dynamic power of Scripture, creed, and confession that speak concretely of this God and what He has done.  God is not like anything.  God is who He is -- which goes back to the very name of God in the Old Testament.  I am who I am.  That is why we fail so when we treat God in the language of feeling or image or symbol.  We try to compare God to something and inevitably to us and therefore fall into the trap of the Roman and Greco pantheon of deities.  God is me magnified.  Scripture insists that this is the worst distortion of God and so commands us not to make a graven image of God.  What this means is not simply the carving of a stone deity but the crafting of language about God or likening God to something else but failing to use the terms Scripture uses.  This too is idolatry and blasphemy.

Because the social sciences frequently use this kind of language, we are all tempted to use it of God and to find commonalities where disparities exist.  Everyone worships something has come to mean that worship is not God addressing us but we addressing Him -- even defining Him.  So immediately the self-disclosure of God is forgotten in favor of how all imagined gods are worshiped, how they have been worshiped over time, and what the worship of Old and New Testament has in common with them.  The Achilles heel of this argument is that God is not the accumulation of all our quests for meaning or understanding or reason to allay our fears, worries, or doubts.  God is unique, known not by postulating ideas of Him but by knowing Him through His own revelation of Himself.

Scripture is blunt.  The only God who is God is the crucified and risen Lord.  There is no path to heaven or to God apart from this path and this God who reveals Himself and His love in suffering for sin not His own and rising to bestow upon the mortals immortality.  It is concrete.  Know this Savior and you know the Father for they are one.  The Spirit is not some sort of ethereal reality to transcend the concrete of this life but the power to bring the Word to life in us, to teach us to believe, and to empower us to live holy, upright, and godly lives within the framework of this present mortality.

Theology has devolved into attempts to explain things or render them rational or to impart to the concrete a higher value or plane of existence than the mortal.  In this way theology has become untethered from that which gives it meaning or value.  In this sense, every real theology is Biblical theology and every real Biblical theology is Christology.  We do not put God in this cage but God has revealed Himself to us in this way and refuses to be known by other ways.    Within the spiritual hunger of our times for meaning, purpose, reason, and hope do live those who attempt to offer metaphysical answers to concrete questions.  Some of them sound good and take us in as if we have found a voice which can live within the rickety framework of imagined religion as well as the concrete framework of revealed religion.  Jordan Peterson is one of those figures in this moment but there are many who have come before him and many who will follow him.  The problem is that where the world wants to find ambiguity and type, God is certain and concrete and this is why He is always a stumbling block without the aid of the Spirit to awaken us to faith.

Religion is not love in the abstract or even our love for Him or one another but God's love for us.  Scripture insists upon this.  There is no religion in love welling up from within us but only the first love of God for us.  This is what love means and we see it in the cross and empty tomb.  This love is not words or symbols for suffering endured and blood shed.  It is almost laughable how quickly love in Christianity has come to mean advocacy for the disaffected masses in need.  It is entirely predictable but tragic how noble Christian charity has become an NGO using tax dollars to do what Christ has called us to do.   Love has joined the corrupted words like mission and evangelism which does just about anything but speak Christ so the Spirit can call, gather, enlighten, and sanctify a people to gather around the Word preached and taught, the baptismal water washing clean, and the Eucharistic bread and wine to satisfy all hunger and thirst.  How odd it is that we are more comfortable with love that tells somebody's story but does not cross the road and bind up wounds or water that symbolizes everything but does nothing or the Real Presence which is absent in bread and wine only to live in the heart!

The world keeps asking what God is like and we must tell them who God is.  The congregation gathers to know what life in the Spirit is like and we must tell them it is living within the life of God through the means of grace.  The work of the church keeps asking how to make a big difference and we must tell them love always works one on one.  The guilty seek forgiveness as if it were merely a verdict granted to them that they are okay and we must continue to call them to repentance and absolve them so that they might be the new people God has declared them in baptism.  The people are itching to pray and tell God what they want God to know and do and we must continue to remind them that the mightiest prayer of all is three words: Lord, have mercy.  Nobody is saved by the idea of God but everyone who calls upon the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ shall be saved.